At Injustice: Gods Among Us’ launch event in Toronto, I had the chance to sit down and talk to Mortal Kombat co-creator and Injustice’s director, Ed Boon.

We discussed the origins of Mortal Kombat, what it’s like to take some time away from the uber-popular franchise he helped create, and also the difficulties of appealing to both casual and hardcore gamers with Injustice: Gods Among Us. He was also amusingly amazed that the Canadian government doesn’t own the Canada.com domain name.

Q: I played a bit of Injustice last night and one of the main things I noticed about the game so far is how accessible it is. I used to be really into fighting games as a kid, especially the Mortal Kombat franchise, but over the last few years, I’ve lost touch with the genre.

When things went 3D it all just got too complicated for me. Was balancing accessibility and appealing to a hardcore demographic a concern during development?

Ed Boon: It was. Over the years, I personally feel that fighting games became too technical. Most people don’t want to study a game before they start having fun. While there is certainly an audience for that technical part, the reality is, is that people should have fun when they first start playing the game. We’re just trying to make things more accessible and easier to do so that more people can enjoy it.

That was also our biggest challenge, appealing to both demographics. The hardcore tournament guys are the ones that are the most vocal online and the loudest.

Q: Did you bring any pros in during development to try the game?

Ed Boon: Yea, we brought in a number of them, a lot of the guys that play in the EVO tournaments stuff. But the reality of it is most people are like you and you played part three (of Mortal Kombat), or you didn’t follow the series for 20 years. So with Injustice, this was one of our design goals.

Everybody knows Batman and everybody knows Superman so it was kind of nice to just get those guys and let people play with them (in Injustice).

Q: Has working on Injustice been a nice change of pace from Mortal Kombat? It must be interesting to get to work within someone else’s universe for a change.

Ed Boon: It was great. I grew up with comic books. They were one of the biggest forms of entertainment back then. They also just started making the super hero movies and the batman movies. So that was a huge deal for me when comic books and movies started overlapping.

Superman seems like he’s owning Soloman Grundy.

I was a DC guy, I liked the Flash, Green Lantern, all those guys.

Q: Did DC restrict anything that you wanted to do?

Yea, there were a couple of things, but we were actually familiar with the rules of the characters already. We weren’t going to have a scenario where Superman was killing people. Batman never uses a gun. We were already aware of those rules. There were a couple of times when DC said, “You know that’s really not consistent.”

For the most part, they were just the ultimate collaborators with us and were offering stuff up. They were as excited about this game as we were and wanted to see something big. DC is on a roll with the Arkham City games, so they’re on board with us.

Q: Something I’ve always wondered, especially back when I played the Mortal Kombat franchise as a kid, is what was the inspiration for the first Mortal Kombat? To me, at least back then, the concept of a game like that seems pretty out there.

Lex Luther is ready to destroy everything.

Ed Boon: The inspiration for the first game was every movie we’d seen growing up. If you really look at every character we have they were kind of inspired by someone. Johnny Cage is inspired by John Claude Van Dam, Liu Kang is inspired by Bruce Lee, Raiden is from Big Trouble in Little China, Kano is a hybrid of the Terminator with a little Mad Max.

We really were kind of drawing from all these movies experiences with a lot of clichés and just trying to represent those characters in a video game.

Q: I’ve always felt that the Mortal Kombat franchise has never taken itself too seriously. A friend of mind described it once as “campy” in a way. Is there any of that self awareness and sense of humour in Injustice?

Ed Boon: I think one of the reasons why Mortal Kombat doesn’t take itself too seriously is because the violence is just so over the top. You can’t take that seriously. It’s so extreme that you just can’t. So that kind of guided us.

This game I think takes itself a little more seriously. There are comedic elements with the Joker. So that exists in there with Injustice but its not quite as campy.

Q: After playing Injustice last night, one of the major things I noticed was how interactive its environments are. I’m not that familiar with the fighting genre, but this seemed pretty unique?

Batman looks rather angry in this screenshot.

When making the game, one of our key pillar points of the game was interactive environments, multiple environments (different stages with different backgrounds). We really wanted the environments to be completely influential to the fight, where as in other games they are just a back drop to the action.

Q: Was there anything you specifically tweaked in the game to make it appeal to a non-fighting game centric demographic?

Ed Boon: The overall difficulty of the story mode is low. We didn’t want any progression stoppers. We wanted a lot of the super moves to just be one button press.

So if you’re playing the game and you see your meters full and you pull the trigger, you’re going to get something really cool. The hardcore guys, what we found out was that they could just as easily do two fireballs with two buttons as they could just pull a trigger.

So with them it’s more about what they do with it and their strategy behind them.